A group of Penn State physicists says the universe we now see could have arisen from a "Big Bounce" rather than a Big Bang.
The new work by Penn State, led by professor Abhay Ashtekar, director of the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, proposes ways to apply quantum physics "further back in time than ever before – right …

Re: Big Bounce

Everyone is trying to find alternative views to the processes at Time Zero. The Big Bounce view is nothing new, what would be new would be to put some numbers to the process.

I have never been convinced about the arithmetic of Time Zero. Clearly in a singularity the density is enormous however this also means that time is dilated so far as to be meaningless, so when someone declares that at 10e-38 sec after the Big Bang that matter condenses out of the primal cloud in current time this might be billions of years. Similarly if time is irrelevant then there can be no velocity, and consequently no distance. The primal cloud could be full of structures and yet be very small, from the inside we would not be aware of this. The view that without time there is not distance and without distance there is no time is paradoxical. However the standing of time as a dimension is dubious and is a convention we have developed to account for change, it is very much a result of what is happening rather than a cause. There is no question that time is flexible.

It might be that the big bang is no more than the realisation of time, what was very close is now extremely distant because time enables velocity acceleration and distance. The Big Bounce might be the collapse of time followed by the expansion of time.

I can't help but laugh at every single one of the theories for the origins of the universe. It's like an ant trying to comprehend the earth's rotation around the sun. We just don't have the scale or perspective and no theory can ever be proved.

Re: Speaking of perspective,

I'm glad someone took the effort to reply, rather than simply downvoting me. I welcome a discussion on this, I've always been confused by the ready acceptance of the Big Bang Theory. To me it speaks more to humanity's inability to comprehend infinity and a need for endings and beginnings, rather than a genuine 'origin of the universe' .

Semantics aside, I didn't understand you when you say we're on the same magnitude of ants.

Re: at least it's a better theory than bird poo

I made a somewhat indirect reference to this on another article hereabouts a short time ago. It appears that no-one at the time quite got the reference, but it seems like you probably would have. Well done you!

Laws of Physics breaking down, etc.

The minimum size was exactly one Planck distance larger than the size where the ultimate Laws of Physics break down. It bounced off the limits of those laws.

Just like "Nature abhors a vacuum", She also almost-magically avoids discontinuities. In 13.77 billion years, Nature has 'divided by zero' exactly zero times. In years-per-discontinuity, that's a rate of...

Penrose's explanation of the end...

.. of the universe and the whole solution to heat death and the start of the universe* was on a... panorama I think? recently and as an astrophyicist by training I was just utterly gobsmacked.

It was so... elegant.

It's as close as I get to a religious experience and I am still getting tingles when I think about it. It's quite humbling when you realise the gap between intellects who can come up with these solutions and yourself.

Oh well, I just hope that the human race keeps churning out minds like his.

*as I understood it, and I could well be out of practice, the universe will eventually cool to absolute zero (or close enough that quantum fluctuations are the only accelerating things) at which point space and time will have no real meaning since there won't be anything to distinguish anything from anything else. At which point everywhere is basically nowhere and so could be treated as a singularity which could then explode.

I probably mangled that thoroughly after 10 years away from university and not doing physics, but I think that was the gist of it.

Re: Penrose's explanation of the end...

Re: Penrose's explanation of the end...

Thanks.

When my head isn't going 'Stop attempting to think this, it hurts', I'm envisioning this as the 'onion-doughnut ' image of The Reality with multiple universes stacked above/below each other, a la Excession...I'm probably wrong tho...

Re: Penrose's explanation of the end...

<li>At the heat-death of the universe, entropy is absolute, quantum fluctuations cause "clumping" which draws other matter into the clumps. to borrow from DA it's a "Gnab Gib".</li>

<li>After the GG, the universe is contracting, time moves "backward(-ish)", and entropy tends toward minimum.</li>

<li>After the final contraction (cold-death?) of the universe, everything is in one solid point, QF causes something to move, which breaks the draw, and everything starts expanding (Bing Bang/Bounce style)</li></ul>

Re: What is the difference between

Not being a physicist I can just about understand these theories, although the underlying mathematics makes my head spin.

I've always wondered if the rules for things at a quantum scale are different to those of our macro universe, is it not possible that there is a larger scale we're not aware of with another different set of rules? If that is the case, would a universe experiencing heat death with its near uniformity not appear at this greater scale as a singularity? I imagine this singularity experiencing a sudden expansion so that the universe has effectively 'blown out' into this larger scale with it's different rule set. Perhaps the universe has been constantly expanding through different scales. It rapidly expands into its new scale (the blow out), then gradually expands until it reaches heat death, at which point it is indistinguishable from a singularity and blows out into the next scale.

Re: What is the difference between

And what if all that which became that singularity of yours, both expands and contracts at the same time? At one pole, a massive expansion occulting the last crumbs of the contraction of the last bounce. And at the other pole, the remnants of that same expansion lost in the muster of the Light Militia of Black Holes hell bent for camp. Never a moment of beginning. A seamless transition of the infinite bounces of the universe. And like a balloon that takes more time to inflate than it does to collapse with a cigarette.